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Social media provide access to behavioural data at an unprecedented scale and granularity. However, using these data to understand phenomena in a broader population is difficult due to their non-representativeness and the bias of…
The digitalisation of childhood underscores the importance of early digital skill development. To understand how peer relationships shape this process, we draw on unique sociocentric network data from students in classrooms across three…
Our goal in this paper is to develop a practical framework for obtaining a uniform sample of users in an online social network (OSN) by crawling its social graph. Such a sample allows to estimate any user property and some topological…
Network sampling is a crucial technique for analyzing large or partially observable networks. However, the effectiveness of different sampling methods can vary significantly depending on the context. In this study, we empirically compare…
A growing body of literature attempts to learn about contagion using observational (i.e. non-experimental) data collected from a single social network. While the conclusions of these studies may be correct, the methods rely on assumptions…
Different measures have been proposed to predict whether individuals will adopt a new behavior in online social networks, given the influence produced by their neighbors. In this paper, we show one can achieve significant improvement over…
Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we…
The network scale-up method (NSUM) is a survey-based method for estimating the number of individuals in a hidden or hard-to-reach subgroup of a general population. In NSUM surveys, sampled individuals report how many others they know in the…
Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today's digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of online populations for more than 160 countries and regions across…
While digital divide studies primarily focused on access to information and communications technology (ICT) in the past, its influence on other associated dimensions such as privacy is becoming critical with a far-reaching impact on the…
In the past years we have witnessed the emergence of the new discipline of computational social science, which promotes a new data-driven and computation-based approach to social sciences. In this article we discuss how the availability of…
The overwhelming success of online social networks, the key actors in the Web 2.0 cosmos, has reshaped human interactions globally. To help understand the fundamental mechanisms which determine the fate of online social networks at the…
The effects of the ongoing Digital Transformation of society are far-reaching and subject to a multitude of impact factors. Beyond a well-established impact on businesses and economic processes, the Digital Transformation remains a driver…
Obtaining sound inferences over remote networks via active or passive measurements is difficult. Active measurement campaigns face challenges of load, coverage, and visibility. Passive measurements require a privileged vantage point. Even…
Social networking sites (SNS) have recently used by millions of people all over the world. An SNS is a society on the Internet, where people communicate and foster friendship with each other. We examine a nation-wide SNS (more than six…
New computer-mediated channels of communication are action oriented and have the ability to deliver information and dialogue - moderated and unmoderated - which can facilitate the bringing together of a series of society's stakeholders,…
Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large…
Mapping the Internet generally consists in sampling the network from a limited set of sources by using "traceroute"-like probes. This methodology, akin to the merging of different spanning trees to a set of destinations, has been argued to…
Today, smartphone devices are owned by a large portion of the population and have become a very popular platform for accessing the Internet. Smartphones provide the user with immediate access to information and services. However, they can…
The modern age has seen an exponential growth of social network data available on the web. Analysis of these networks reveal important structural information about these networks in particular and about our societies in general. More often…